Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play

Shakespeare and the Jews

Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare

THE YEAR OF LEAR

*Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography
*Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography
*Finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award
*Short-listed for the PBK Christian Gauss Award
*Short-listed for the Theatre Book Prize
*Short-listed for the PEN Hessell–Tiltman History Prize

Listed among the best books of the year in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Spectator, The Daily Beast, The Observer, The Daily Express, The London Evening Standard, The International Business Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The New Statesman.

James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) brings to dazzling life the world from which sprang the best crop of new plays in theatre history. ' Nicholas Hytner, Observer

'James Shapiro’s 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) is a meticulous narrative of a momentous year in the life of the playwright and a masterpiece of intelligent literary criticism.' Colm Toibin, Observer

'James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) is a superb follow-up to his 1599, packed with intriguing discoveries that bring the Jacobean world to life. ' Stephanie Merritt, Observer

'Shapiro's rich portrait of 1606 is every bit as compelling as his excellent 1599, handling huge amounts of research with a winningly light touch.' Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times

‘My book of the year is a “book of a year” in a slightly different sense. I’m thinking of James Shapiro’s truly magnificent 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. This is one of those rare academic studies that reads like a novel – a novel with at least one major revelation per page…It’s a work of genius.’ Paul Muldoon, TLS

'This in a sense is Shapiro’s sequel to 1599, but there’s nothing jaded in the performance; few serious academics marshal their research so elegantly, and few synthesis literary and historical elements to such powerful effect’ Andrew Motion, TLS

'James Shapiro’s outstanding 1606 (Faber), in which the Jacobean Shakes­peare gets his due, follow[s] Shapiro’s magnificent take on the Elizabethan one in 1599.' Sarah Churchwell, Guardian

'In James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber, £20) we meet a middle-aged Shakespeare who is stranded in something of a dry patch, until the political firestorms of early Jacobean England push him into producing his greatest play, King Lear.' Daniel Swift, The Spectator

'Shakespeare might hardly seem to need another biography, but James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) is so much more than that. Using the same methodology that he brought to 1599, his masterpiece of 10 years ago, Shapiro digs deep into the social and political context that gave rise to Shakespeare’s greatest late work. There is terror on the streets, thanks to the failed gunpowder plot and to an outbreak of plague, while at the Jacobean court politics is, as ever, rotten to the core. In masterly detail Shapiro shows how this simmering paranoia fed into every line of King Lear.' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

'One of the best books in recent memory about Shakespeare.' The Daily Beast

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: What Shapiro does, with consummate skill and in a friendly and evocative style, is sort through the information that has emerged from old libraries and dusty archives in the last 50 years, and then he consolidates it and brings it alive in a smooth, lively and conversational style. He brings Shakespeare himself alive by demonstrating how the playwright’s mind worked over not only events but also other writers’ perceptions….“The Year of Lear” is irresistible — a banquet of wisdom about the small and dramatic world that a 42-year-old playwright is living in, on the one hand, and a convincing and inspiring argument about how the mind of that playwright must have worked in order to meld his life with his productions. (Jane Smiley)

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: [W]onderfully illuminating….Shapiro’s ‘A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599’ broke new ground in the subtlety, vividness, and richness of its explorations of the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and their immediate social and political settings. He repeats that achievement for 1606….Shapiro has a marvelous ability to use his formidable scholarship, not to pluck out the heart of Shakespeare’s mysteries, but to put the beating heart of the contemporary back into them. His great gift is to make the plays seem at once more comprehensible and more staggering….The great pleasure of ‘The Year of Lear’ is that Shapiro allows to feel the movement of Shakespeare’s quicksilver mind as he seizes on James’s political and religious obsessions and makes them his own. (Fintan O’Toole)

THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: How many literary historians have even heard of ‘groundsills’, let alone ‘frost heave’? But Shapiro knows about this sort of work from first-hand experience: for many years he had a house in Vermont where he taught himself to build dry-stone walls. There’s a sense in which his approach to cultural history resembles the careful methods of a craft in which so much depends on the builder’s eye for shape, size and weight, and on the fine sense of contour which ensures that each undressed boulder will lock into those below and beside it without the need for mortar. In his new book, Shapiro caps his account of the superstitious fear that engulfed England as Shakespeare was writing Macbeth with another wonderful deployed detail: recent archaeological work on the King’s Tower at Knole has revealed that the workmen who refurbished the building in 1606, seeking to protect its occupants from ‘devils, witches and other malevolent spirits’, carved magical symbols on a tie-beam supporting its principal chamber. What makes Shapiro’s books so fascinating is not the revelation of any startlingly novel facts about Shakespeare the man, but his ability to piece together an extraordinary range of historical information that, combined with an acute critical intelligence, allows him to build a coherent and persuasive narrative that casts fresh light on the plays themselves. (Michael Neill)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: One of the more delightful harbingers of next year's quatercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare's death is the appearance of a new book by James Shapiro, the liveliest and most accessible of Bardologists, who -- apart from performing the inestimable service, in "Contested Will" (2010), of seeing off for good the ineffably tedious gang of Shakespeare-authorship conspiracists -- has previously offered a fine and sassy study of the momentous year of 1599….In "The Year of Lear," Mr. Shapiro focuses on 1606, the fertile twelvemonth in which Shakespeare finished not only "Lear" but also "Macbeth" and "Antony and Cleopatra." It is, like its predecessor, a work of scrupulous scholarship…The book is crammed with stimulating research that again and again produces startling connections….Mr. Shapiro has once again brought Shakespeare's world to precise and pertinent life; the bright light he shines into obscure corners gives us the illusion that we can almost glimpse the dramatist himself, but he immediately slips away again. It is to be hoped that Mr. Shapiro might be persuaded to write a book for every year of Shakespeare's life: Then we might finally find ourselves face to face with the Sphinx of English literature. (Simon Callow)

THE NEW YORKER: Deftly illuminating the plays’ more opaque passages, Shapiro captures a Shakespeare moved by—and moving—history.

THE SUNDAY TIMES: In his prize-winning book, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, he searched for traces of real-life events in the plays written that year. His new book shifts the inquiry to Shakespeare's annus mirabilis of 1606 when, after a seemingly fallow period, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra burst upon the world. Despite the intricate tangles of evidence he assembles, he manages, as in 1599, to present his argument in a series of vivid, sometimes harrowing, narratives…..Shapiro's investigation of Shakespeare's professional fortunes is as fascinating as his scrutiny of the plays….[His book] draws on a mountain of reading, yet is persistently original. It takes us onto the streets of Shakespeare's London, and it reminds us of the brutal culture from which his plays sprang. (John Carey)

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: 'The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606' is Shapiro’s latest, and his best yet. His mastery of detail and overarching themes is such that, although he sticks to the facts and rarely deals in speculation, this work of biography, cultural history, and criticism has all the richness of fiction….The Year of Lear is rich in such historical details, and Shapiro’s prose is always graceful and, even in long discursions, direct and to the point. ….The long bibliographical essay at the back of the book provides evidence of just how many records and facts Shapiro has pieced together to create this seamless, inventive, and fascinating narrative. (Michael Paller)

THE OBSERVER: [In] 1599, a prize-winning account of Shakespeare’s annus mirabilis...Shapiro demonstrated that, by paying attention to the interaction of play text and historical context, we could make important discoveries about Shakespeare’s creative process. But 1599 is not the only high point in Shakespeare’s CV…there’s 1605/​06, famous for the gunpowder plot and its bloody aftermath, a moment when historical drama and dramatic history seem to compete with each other in extremes of threat, conspiracy and terror. This has become Shapiro’s latest subject, a darker sequel to his 1599….Shapiro’s dark, enthralling, and brilliant narrative includes a nice aside in which he reveals that the age-old thespian fuss about “the Scottish play” was actually a Victorian invention, the work of the incomparable Max Beerbohm. (Robert McCrum)

THE WASHINGTON POST: In “The Year of Lear” Shapiro takes a closer look at the political and social turmoil that contributed to the creation of three supreme masterpieces, all written in 1606: “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra”….His new book is certainly exciting and sometimes revelatory…. As Shapiro persuasively shows, the tragedies of 1606 refract the real-life dramas of the Jacobean Age. (Michael Dirda).

THE SPECTATOR: 1606 was not just, rhymingly, the year of Lear; it was also the year of Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. And Shapiro shows how all these disparate national anxieties come roaring into the work. 1606, in the tradition of the author’s breakthrough book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, zeroes in on its particular historical moment to explain, in detail, how this worked. In doing so he illuminates the plays and shows how intensely particular in origin these universal dramas are. The Shakespeare Shapiro painstakingly and subtly presents here is a virtuoso remix artist, a textual sponge, a magpie, a master-orchestrator of the Zeitgeist….Shapiro pays attention to the feel of day-to-day life, too, not just to literary influence and top-level history….In the fine tradition of early modern historicism, Shapiro is at pains to emphasise how intensely literary were the politics of the time…‘Political theatre’ is a dismissive buzz-phrase nowadays: but for the Jacobean court, politics was theatrical and theatre was political. Interpretation was everything. All the world, as this terrifically interesting book shows, really was a stage. (Sam Leith)

THE GUARDIAN: The chief theme of Shapiro’s 1606 is precisely Shakespeare’s profound engagement with that “troubled national mood”. In this year he produced three of his greatest tragedies – King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra….It is an incredible burst of sustained creative labour, and Shapiro shows how powerfully these plays addressed the political and social upheavals of the time: they “collectively reflect their fraught cultural moment”…. Shapiro demonstrates once again his skill in shaping quantities of research into a brisk and enjoyable narrative. The material is extremely condensed but does not seem so. One could describe certain passages as tending to the “novelistic” – a dread word in some academic circles – but animating the historical data is very different from obscuring it with madeup conversations in unevidenced locations. There is, throughout, an attentively interrogative mood. Ever since his first book, Shakespeare and the Jews (1997), Shapiro has stressed his resistance to the anecdotal, myth-making tendencies of history, which are such a temptation for the biographer working in the early modern era, where so little remains. Such stories “retain their currency”, he wrote in that book, “because they tell us what we want to hear, even if at some level we know them to be untrue”. (Charles Nicholl)

THE INDEPENDENT: In 1606 Shakespeare “pens three of his greatest plays: King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. As Shapiro shows in exhaustive yet exhilarating depth, these works reflect the dark and anxious public mood which dominated a year which began in the shadow of the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605, and ended with an outbreak of plague in London, whose victims included Shakespeare’s own landlady….Shapiro has….a vigorous, burning appetite for historical information and an equally burning desire to impart it….What Shapiro knows better than most is that the devil is in the details.” (Lucasta Miller)

THE FINANCIAL TIMES: In 1606 Shapiro shows how first King Lear, then Macbeth emerged from a fraught Jacobean London, rocked by the foiled terrorist attack we know as the Gunpowder Plot and resurgent fears about witchcraft. Literary creation is a mysterious, alchemical process but Shapiro enables us to see how Shakespeare identifies a character, story or even a word from his historical moment and fashions it into compelling and enduring drama. (Jerry Brotton)

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: William Shakespeare’s most famous works are something like a chain of islands in an evaporating sea. The plays were originally submerged in a distinct cultural moment, awash in contemporary politics, scandals, and topical allusions. The prominence of these once-current events has receded over the past 400 years. But traces of their vanished influences are still visible in the plays themselves, smoothed and shaped by the liquid ambience of the times. James Shapiro’s insightful new book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, performs a kind of archaeological excavation of the three plays Shakespeare wrote in this year – "King Lear," "Macbeth," and "Antony and Cleopatra" – to reveal the rich matrix of factors that molded their themes and language…. Shapiro is equally adept at illuminating the ways in which "King Lear" and "Antony and Cleopatra" are entangled with the political and religious currents of their times. Harold Bloom, probably the loudest if not always the most insightful of Shakespeare idolaters, has dismissed the sort of historically contextualized readings of the plays that Shapiro offers….Shapiro shows precisely what social and cultural energies are and how they influence even – perhaps especially – the most extraordinary minds and hearts. (Nick Romeo)

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS: Shapiro brings us closer to the words, the plays, to Shakespeare himself, not distancing us as so many critics and scholars do.... As a preface to reading the plays for the first time, or a fresh chapter in a lifetime of readings and performances, as history and as storytelling, as well as a work of scholarly construction, this is a remarkable, completely fresh look at how literature, and history, come to be. (David Walton)

EVENING STANDARD: James Shapiro’s ‘1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare’ (which scooped the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006) was the kind of blisteringly good book you push onto as many loved ones as will listen….He returns to the same technique for his follow-up, this time focusing on a second prolific year of playwriting when Shakespeare churned out Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra….[A]s with 1599, this is a book I would recommend to everyone and (apologies to friends and family) won’t stop rabbiting on about at dinners for weeks to come. How about one last year to make up a trilogy? 1611, perhaps, the year of three romances: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest? Here’s hoping. (William Moore)

THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: (five star review) It’s…a sign of Shapiro’s ingenuity, his mastery of the period and his always persuasive readings of the plays that ‘1606’ works so well as a book….One of the book’s real achievements is how hard it makes you think for yourself about the plays, not only in the context of their times, but in the context of each other as they rumbled in Shakespeare’s head like the chords of Beethoven string quartets. (Tom Payne)

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: There is no one better at connecting Shakespeare's life and art than Columbia professor James Shapiro, whose latest work, "The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606" sets out to understand the harrowing public and private forces that shaped what many consider to be the playwright's supreme tragedy. (Charles McNulty)

THE TIMES (LONDON): James Shapiro bestrides the Shakespearean world like a colossus, in the happier sense of the phrase….Shapiro's research credentials are impeccable, but he's also one of the field's great communicators. Shakespeare and the Jews is one of the most readable works of original scholarship to have emerged in recent years; Contested Will is a popular primer on the persistence of conspiracist authorship theories, a subject on which Shapiro is an engaging public speaker. However, if you've read one of his books, it will likely be 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare (2005). An eloquent, accessible stroll through the year in which Shakespeare drafted Hamlet, the prizewinning 1599 proved to publishers that serious Shakespeare could be a bestseller. This book, 1606: William Shakespeare and The Year of Lear is his long-awaited follow-up….“To draw Shakespeare out of the shadows demands considerable effort and imaginative labour". Fortunately, Shapiro has never lacked for either. ‘1606’ remains a work of rich detail. (Kate Maltby)

THE SCOTSMAN: At the beginning of this excellent and ingenious book, James Shapiro makes a very smart observation: "Try imagining a version of Shakespeare In Love that ends with a cameo appearance of the Scottish king rather than the Virgin Queen"..... As he did with ‘1599’... Shapiro takes the historical context, rigorously researched and uncondescendingly presented, and allows the greater significance in terms of Shakespeare's life and work to shimmer around it…. Shapiro rekindles interest in the plays with every page, and I could imagine him writing something fascinating about every year, month and day of Shakespeare's life. (Stuart Kelly)

IRISH TIMES: [A]s James Shapiro explores in his informative and exciting new book, 1606 was a significant, epoch-defining time that formed the background to two of Shakespeare greatest tragedies, King Lear and Macbeth, as well as Antony and Cleopatra.…[T]he great strength of Shapiro’s book is that he is able to combine acute literary criticism with substantial historical knowledge so reader always know why something is relevant and how a particular detail works in a play. He is at his best when writing about equivocation, the Jesuit defence of sly verbal trickery when confronted by a hostile enemy. (Andrew Hadfield)

TLS: 1606 is at its best in the chapters on Macbeth, where the interpenetration of age and stage is both immediate and insidious. Shapiro gives an authoritative account of the Gunpowder Plot, but his most potent insight is the paradoxical one that it galvanized contemporaries by eliciting horrible images of what might have happened but did not. Apocalyptic, sulphurous, diabolical: such was the destruction of the Lords and the royal family that never took place. The affinity between the Plot’s conjuration of unreal horrors and the illusory work of the theatre is clear. With Shapiro’s arguments behind us, we can see why what happens in Macbeth feels like a waking nightmare….James Shapiro does not treat 1606 as a box in which plays were composed and stacked. He is always alert to process, to how the tragedies that he looks at were conditioned by the turbulence through which they were written and at how their meanings shifted as they were overtaken by events….[L]ucidly inclusive, well written and critically reliable. (John Kerrigan)

COMMONWEAL: You don’t need to be a provocative thespian to appreciate Year of Lear: Like other Shapiro works, the book is a brilliant, accessible fusion of meticulously researched historical narrative and keen-eyed literary criticism. … Shapiro’s writing never gets too speculative about the thoughts and actions of Shakespeare, who left a famously slender biographical paper trail. Rather, The Year of Lear refers constantly to specific texts, by the Bard and others, deploying details and reasoned deductions so skillfully that they conjure up an implicit image of Shakespeare witnessing, reading, thinking, and turning national experience into art. In some ways, it’s as close as you’re going to get to the playwright who wrote (in King Lear), “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.” (Celia Wren)

LITERARY REVIEW: ‘1606’ is richly packed with accounts of court masques, turbulent political events and the composition and performance of three major Shakespeare plays….Shapiro applies his most penetrating and wide-ranging scrutiny to ‘Macbeth’ and the multiple resonances of ‘equivocation.’ It is here that is approach is most convincingly topical….It is here, too, that Shapiro has most to say about witches, witch-hunting, and the many actual and imagined conspiracies that overshadowed the area from which Shakespeare hailed. (Katherine Duncan-Jones)

PROSPECT MAGAZINE: Biographies of William Shakespeare tend to be unsatisfying because the playwright left so few traces of his personality in the records. Another, more fruitful, approach taken by scholar James Shapiro in this probing and original book is to examine the turbulent political events he lived through and how he responded to them in his work….Shapiro shows how he was not only for all time, but also very much of his age. (Sameer Rahim)

THE AUSTRALIAN: The year 1606 - and the coincidence of the Lear being performed soon after the failed Gunpowder Plot - serve as a pretext for this clever and alluring look at Shakespeare's times. It's attractively put together...If you feel like a bath in the brimstone and barbarism, the rhetoric and unconscious poetry of the Jacobean age…you could do worse than read ‘1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear.’ (Peter Craven)

TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION: So can 1606 really emulate the success of 1599? It can very nearly….Shapiro shows that 1606 was indeed a pivotal year since it saw the execution of the Gunpowder plotters, the visit of Christian IV of Denmark and the reburial of Elizabeth, plague, continued discussion of union between England and Scotland, the launch of the Jamestown colony, a false rumour of King James’ death that caused panic in London, the passing of the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, and the introduction of the Oath of Allegiance. Like its predecessor, too, this book is immensely readable and full of apercus.…Shapiro’s new book is a pleasure to read, and it tells a happy story. It opens with Shakespeare at a low creative ebb, not doing as well under James as he had under Elizabeth, seemingly struggling for inspiration, and with less of his work in print. It goes on to trace how he recovered from this to produce three of his greatest plays, and our interest never flags along the way. (Lisa Hopkins)

RTÉ: James Shapiro, author of 1606 (whose full title is 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear) teaches at Columbia University in the USA and already received much acclaim for his most recent work,1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare….We learned how Shakespeare, clearly a busy man, worked as an actor, a businessman and playwright. Seven years later,in the sequel, as it were, Shakespeare is trying to make ends meet in particularly fraught times under King James I (or King James VI of Scotland who reigned over the entire kingdom between 1566 and 1625).]…. Shapiro's new book is an illuminating, highly accessible account of a key year. (Paddy Kehoe)

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW: A good biographer has to be a sophisticated critic and historian, and dusty enough from archival work to deploy the scraps of evidence we have. James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, is all of these….‘1606’ is nuanced, erudite, and engaging – an impressive picture of our greatest writer. (James McNamara)

THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON: The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro is, like the London square drawn on its cover, tumultuous, dark and teeming with life…. The Year of Lear shows that Shakespeare was not aloof from current events, even if his own views are mysterious and lost to history. By shedding light on the parochial fears, temptations, and contretemps of Shakespeare’s time, the book helps readers appreciate the magnitude of his triumph. (Blake Seitz)

NEW ZEALAND HERALD: In the gripping 1606: William Shakespeare And The Year Of Lear…a follow-up to his 1599 (2006), James Shapiro draws parallels between James I's nervy accession and the Gunpowder Plot with Shakespeare's bleak masterpiece, King Lear, and its themes of divided kingdoms and poisoned inheritance. London in 1606, so colourfully conveyed by Shapiro, was a city of plague and witchcraft, its king a student of demonology. It took the clear gaze of the playwright to shape the neurosis of the age into an immortal work. (Sinclair McKay)

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: Shapiro brings considerable erudition and an admirably light touch to this interweaving of Shakespeare's career and the social and political history of Jacobean England. He has the enviable knack of being able to write for a non-academic readership without compromising the scholarly integrity of his work. (Andrew Riemer)

BOOKLIST (starred review): In a difficult year for England, Shapiro recognizes a fruitful time for the country’s greatest playwright—William Shakespeare. Indeed, the very difficulties of 1606 incubated the imaginative vigor manifest in the three masterpieces the Bard completed in that year—King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth. The tensions of 1606 arose in part from the push by the new monarch, King James, to unite his Scottish homeland with England, a push raising vexing questions about national identity and about how a divided royalty can strain that identity. Shakespeare embeds these questions in the realpolitik of Lear, so signaling the self-transformation that made a premier Elizabethan dramatist into an iconic Jacobean. Readers detect further evidence of this transformation in Antony and Cleopatra, where the pacific Octavius looks remarkably like the irenic James. True, the peace-loving James became stern after he was almost killed in the blast planned by those who hatched the Gunpowder Plot. But a resourceful Jacobean poet could infuse the fiery royal rhetoric that prosecutors turned against the plotters into King Lear’s climactic outburst on the heath. Even the epidemic of plague closing theaters for much of 1606 inspired Shakespeare, who memorialized the tragedy in elegiac lines in Macbeth. An impressively fine-grained Shakespearean inquiry.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Shakespeare expert Shapiro (Contested Will) delivers a fascinating account of the events of 1606 and how they may have influenced three tragedies the Bard is thought to have written that year or soon afterwards. He starts by acknowledging that writers, including Shapiro himself, have traditionally treated Shakespeare as an Elizabethan playwright instead of a Jacobean one, though some of his greatest plays are from the latter era. Shapiro goes on to trace the Shakespearean implications of a year that included the trial (and execution) of Guy Fawkes for the Gunpowder Plot, plague, European royals visiting England, and family drama. It’s an inherently fraught task—“I’m painfully aware that many of the things I’d like to know about him... cannot be recovered”—but Shapiro convincingly demonstrates how closely contemporary events are reflected in the plays. The parties in Antony and Cleopatra that leave Pompey drunk “have no source in Plutarch,” so the reports of such events during the visit of Danish King Christian seem a likelier source. The other tragedies explored here—Macbeth and, of course, the titular King Lear—show similar contemporary influences on both plot and theme. Shapiro is as compelling when documenting historical events as when analyzing Shakespeare’s text, and his sizable bibliographic essay provides ample fodder for readers wanting to dive deeper into his research.

KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review): Shakespearean scholar Shapiro (English/​Columbia Univ.; Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, 2010, etc.) links the tumultuous events of 1605 and 1606 to three of the Bard's greatest works. The author examines King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, all written in 1606. For readers seeking the nitty-gritty of historical connections and sources, Shapiro does not disappoint. Adjusting to the new Scottish king, James I, Elizabethan playwrights had to forego being English for British. Unfortunately, the union of crowns wasn't official without the consent of Parliament. It was a sensitive issue both in England and Scotland, and artists presenting plays had to tread carefully. The plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 and a rumor of the king's murder created a fraught atmosphere. The recurring plague transformed Shakespeare's company, his competition, and the audiences to which they played, requiring further alteration to his plays. Shakespeare knew to disguise any events that spoke of broken kingdoms—not only in Lear, but also in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. He used the latest buzzwords—e.g., "equivocation" and "allegiance"—to expose the darkness in men's (and women's) hearts. King James was fixated on demonology, and Shakespeare used Samuel Harsnett's A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures to describe demonic possession and to reflect on social ills and the reasons people commit evil acts. Shakespeare adapted Lear from an older play staged 10 years before, and he strongly leaned on Plutarch's biography for Antony, often using dialogue verbatim. He also used Plutarch's account of a soothsayer in Macbeth, although his main source was Holinshed's Chronicles. Shapiro points out the connections of Shakespeare's plays to his own earlier work but also to whatever was at hand. Shapiro's discoveries of long-lost sources and missed connections make this a fascinating tale. His well-written, scholarly exploration will stand as an influential work that is a joy to read.

(Simon & Schuster, 2015)

(Faber & Faber, 2015)

RECENT WORK

SHAKESPEARE IN AMERICA: A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY FROM THE REVOLUTION TO NOW, ed. by James Shapiro with a foreword by President Bill Clinton

The history of Shakespeare in America is also the history of America itself. From our beginnings as a nation, Shakespeare has been a central, inescapable part of our literary heritage, a figure so widely revered that, as Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, there was “hardly a pioneer’s hut” without a volume or two. Shakespeare in America reveals how, for over two centuries, the plays have been a prism through which crucial American issues—revolution, slavery, war, social justice—were refracted, debated, and understood. Shapiro traces the rich and suprising story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own through a wide range of genres—poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, and comedy routines—and a remarkable roster of American writers: from Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, Isaac Asimov, Adrienne Rich, and Jane Smiley. American statesmen and presidents from John Adams to Bill Clinton (in a foreword written for this volume) offer their own testimonies to Shakespeare’s profound and enduring influence. The anthology also tracks the multitude of ways in which American theater and film have been indelibly marked by Shakespeare: actors from Charlotte Cushman and Edwin Booth to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reinterpret Shakespeare for each new era; the legendary productions of New York’s Yiddish theater are evoked in Cynthia Ozick’s story “Actors”; in the Depression years, Orson Welles revolutionizes Shakespearean performance with his landmark productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; the creators of Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story write Shakespeare into the history of the classic American musical theater; and Joseph Papp, renewing a once flourishing popular taste for the plays, establishes a New York tradition with Shakespeare in the Park.

"'Shakespeare in America'...offers amazing variety--genres, authors, styles, and contexts--all placed in conversation with each other. The result is a wide-ranging of America's ongoing relationship with Shakespeare, uses and abuses alike."
--Virginia Vaughan, Times Literary Supplement

"This is one of the more brilliantly conceived and edited books in the entire recent history of the indispensable ‘Library of America.’"
--The Buffalo News

"There are discoveries and surprises along the way, like Lord Buckley’s beat-era “Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies,” an extended riff on Shakespeare’s most famous speeches (“I came here to lay Caesar out, Not to hip you to him”), and “Shakespeares of 1922,” a vaudeville sketch by Lorenz Hart and Morrie Ryskind. But for many readers the real eye opener will be the heated love affair, richly documented by Professor Shapiro, between ordinary Americans and the most exalted writer in the English language."
--William Grimes, The New York Times

"'Shakespeare in America: An Anthology From the Revolution to Now'…is a fascinating survey of the writer's importance to our culture and his influence on literature, politics, entertainment and more."
--Tampa Bay Times

"You will not want to miss a captivating volume just out from the Library of America titled 'Shakespeare in America: An Anthology From the Revolution to Now,' skillfully edited by James Shapiro."
--James M. Keller, Santa Fe New Mexican

"Shakespeare’s imprint on our culture and literature remains, as this anthology so amply demonstrates. A review of it can only answer one question: Does it accurately reflect the value that Shakespeare’s plays have held in the hearts and minds of Americans throughout our history? Yes, it does. We have treasured them always and everywhere. They’re truly a part of America."
--Bryan Woolley, Dallas Morning News

“The Library of America has brought out a volume dedicated, unusually, to the influence on America of a non-American figure. . . . The collection is delightfully varied. . . . It makes an implicit argument for a distinctly American Shakespeare.”
–Noah Millman, The New York Times Book Review

"Shakespeare in America" is an entertaining, thought-provoking miscellany, one that speaks as much to the American spirit of reinvention and assimilation as it does to the influence of one Elizabethan playwright and poet on the way we think and act and speak."
--James D. Watts, Jr., Tulsa World

"There is 'something of great constancy' behind the dozens of sparkling mometos assembled by Shapiro....like other volumes in the Library of America series, this one is a pleasure to hold and to be behold."
--Christopher Flannery, Claremont Review of Books

“I think Americans will be fascinated to learn of our deep and early connection to the Bard, how he inspired presidents and incited mobs, and how vivid the legacy of one Englishman’s imagination still sits within the consciousness of our country. Like Shakespeare’s own plays, this anthology is full of enthralling stories and weird coincidences, and it’s a treasure.”
—Meryl Streep

“P. T. Barnum loved Shakespeare so much he tried to buy the Bard’s house and bring it to America. James Shapiro has shown why he didn’t need to. Americans have always had their Shakespeare, and in this wonderful volume, they will have him still.”
—Michael Witmore, Director, Folger Shakespeare Library

“This brilliant anthology, hilarious, heartbreaking, and thrilling, shows that Shakespeare is more than our greatest writer; in America, he has also been a battleground. With Shakespeare we have fought about race, anti-Semitism, and gender equality; we have debated class struggle and national independence. With Shakespeare we have forged our national identity. He has made us who we are.”
— Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, The Public Theater

First aired in April 2012 as a BBC4 3-hour documentary: “The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History." Directed by Steven Clarke. Short-listed for the Grierson Award for the Best Historical Documentary, 2012. Now available as a DVD for North American viewers.

“Were I to offer an introductory course in the Bard, one could not ask to do much better than SHAKESPEARE: THE KING'S MAN. [Shapiro’s] smart, sharp and succinct analysis of sixteen plays or so a true joy to experience--he presents them all in a particularly inspired manner, oftentimes highlighted by fantastic live performance footage that manage to expertly capture much of the themes, feel and mood of many of these admittedly tough-to-grasp later plays composed by the King's Man. Indeed, Shapiro's insight into the history of the time and his vast knowledge of the supposed history of the man behind the play himself is thorough and thoughtful to a fault--consistently engaging and never veering too far from the various topics under discussion, with some illuminating location visits and conversations with other historians; the focus always remains firmly set on the second half of Shakespeare's career and the historical circumstances surrounding the creation of the plays themselves. And, who could honestly ask for a better overview?” (Pat Cerasaro, Broadwayworld.com)

"'Shakespeare: The King’s Man' was an absolute delight from start to finish. I’m a fan of Shakespeare, but admittedly don’t know a whole lot about the plays he wrote during his time as “the King’s Man,” when he and company became the “King’s Players,” officially working at the King’s pleasure. This fascinating documentary will appeal to both seasoned historians and general audiences. Scholar James Shapiro deftly guides the viewer through the turbulence of life in the Jacobean court. From the Gunpowder Plot to the writing of the King James Bible, Shaprio illustrates how Shakespeare was influenced by James and how James was influenced by Shakespeare…..This is a great addition to any DVD collection as it appeals to both general and specialized audiences." --Anglotopia.net

American edition: Simon and Schuster, 2010

A New York Times "Notable Book" for 2010

BOOK DESCRIPTION

For two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates - including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford - have been proposed as their true author. "Contested Will" unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays (among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles, and Sir Derek Jacobi). If "Contested Will" does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what's really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical, and if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?

UK edition: Faber & Faber

WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE (Best non-fiction book published in Britain) Also awarded: THE THEATRE BOOK PRIZE